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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the why-oh-why dept.

A number of users have reported that running "rm --no-preserve-root -rf /" not only deletes all their files (as expected), but also permanently bricks their computers (which is not). Tracing the issue revealed that the ultimate cause was that SystemD mounted the EFI pseudo-fs as read-write even when this FS was not listed in fstab, and deleting certain files in this pseudo-fs causes certain buggy, but very common, firmware not to POST anymore. A user reported this bug on SystemD's GitHub issue tracker, asking that the FS be mounted read-only instead of read-write, and said bug was immediately closed as invalid. The comment thread for the bug was locked shortly after. Discuss.

Links:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/02/01/running-a-single-delete-command-can-permanently-brick-laptops-from-inside-linux/


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:54AM (#301128)

    And you thought MS is the evil mofo that will kill Linux.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Tuesday February 09 2016, @03:42AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @03:42AM (#301153)

    More precisely, Redhat and Poettering intend to kill Linux/GNU/X and replace it with Poettering OS or Redhat/Linux or whatever we should take to calling their new operating system. And they do not just intend to, they are far enough on the plan to say they will succeed, at least commercially. If the UNIX Way is to survive with a Linux underpinning it will be the small fry both old and new from Slackware to Devuan who do it because all of the big organizations have been brought onboard.

    Anyone who thinks I'm being overwrought should spend an hour reading their plans once they get the BTRFS part production ready and come back and tell me there is anything of the UNIX Way or what we have known of as Linux in that horror show. It will be more locked down than a carrier phone with signed OS images and package management will be a distro maintainer only activity. NO user adjustable or replaceable parts should be emblazoned on the install disc... except there won't be one of those either.

    • (Score: -1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:07AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:07AM (#301190)

      I don't know what world you live in, but let me school you about how things work:

      Red Hat has given everything away for free. They made the Linux desktop what it is. Everything you know about Linux-- GTK, Xorg, Wayland, SELinux, 1 out of every 6 lines of code in the Linux kernel, cairo, PulseAudio, NetworkManager, Plymouth graphical boot screens, the Liberation Fonts, the Bitstream Vera fonts, ext3, ext4, grub, glibc, Gnome, metacity, gdb. Unless you've been typing away all these years with fvwm2 and lynx on a BSD and XFree86, then you're a beneficiary of the work that Red Hat does. Fedora is the motherfucking distro that Linus uses to write code. They have set the direction for us; we just choose to change the wallpaper and window manager and pretend that we built our own distribution.

      Red Hat is the upstream for /everything/. They employ the maintainers of everything else.

      systemd is not Red Hat's attempt to take over Linux. Red Hat already controls Linux. Red Hat *is* Linux. We are all better off because of their work. End of story.

      If systemd makes you butthurt so bad, feel free to move to a distro that doesn't use it. Red Hat doesn't mind. They aren't even charging you to use their work. They will keep on making money in the enterprise world, and giving their product to the community for free, without spying on you, without giving backdoors to the .gov, and without forcing you to view ads before using their product.

      So while you are pretending to uphold the "UNIX way," you are slamming the only ally that the open source community has been able to consistently rely on for two decades.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:19AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:19AM (#301216)

        And are we better for want of any of it?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:29AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:29AM (#301222)

          Lets go down the list:

          GTK, Was Pottering involved?
          Xorg, Was Pottering involved?
          Wayland, Was Pottering involved?
          SELinux, Arguably is this a good thing, still, was Pottering involved?
          1 out of every 6 lines of code in the Linux kernel, Was Pottering involved?
          cairo, Was Pottering involved?
          PulseAudio, hahahhahahahahha
          NetworkManager, see above. I have a room of servers that still has this bullshit removed.
          Plymouth graphical boot screens, Was Pottering involved?
          the Liberation Fonts, Was Pottering involved?
          the Bitstream Vera fonts, Was Pottering involved?
          ext3, Was Pottering involved?
          ext4, Was Pottering involved?
          grub, Was Pottering involved?
          glibc, Was Pottering involved?
          Gnome, Was Pottering involved? I genuinely don't know on this one. I could see it given what an unusable clusterfuck Gnome3 is now.
          metacity, Was Pottering involved?
          gdb. Was Pottering involved?

          I'm not sure what case you're trying to make. Most of us dislike Pottering specifically, and that casts doubt on everything else. You're not reducing the doubt. Only increasing the breadth.

          • (Score: 3, Informative) by cafebabe on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:31PM

            by cafebabe (894) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:31PM (#301621) Journal

            On the reboot after typing chmod 000 /usr/bin/pulseaudio, I gained 16MB of RAM and 3% of processing power. I also lost one redundant place where the volume could be set to zero. And I have yet to find an application which is adversely affected.

            --
            1702845791×2
      • (Score: 5, Informative) by jmorris on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:20AM

        by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:20AM (#301218)

        GTK

        Wrong. While the first gtk might not quite predate RedHat, it certainly predates RH being a post IPO monster that funds development of an entire OS. Hint: gtk stands for Gimp ToolKit and dates to 1995.

        Xorg

        Child, Xorg was ported TO linux.

        Wayland

        From the people who gave us X11 (not Xorg, you do know the difference?) itself, and guess how old that is? Yea, about that.

        SELinux

        That comes courtesy of the United States Government, specifically the National Security Agency.

        1 out of every 6 lines of code in the Linux kernel

        Granted. Nobody said they were bad Open Source citizens, only that what they are using their muscle to transform the whole ecosystem atop that kernel into something that bears no resemblance to UNIX. Considering Poettering's very public statements on his hatred of UNIX and everything it stands for this should not be a shock.

        PulseAudio

        You mean the turd that kept audio playback unreliable on Linux for over five years as they rammed down a replacement for perfectly working software because of NIH and a BS 'need' to be able to drag a stream in progress from the internal speakers to a BT headset? And notice Android, which really can use that sort of functionality, doesn't use it.

        NetworkManager

        You mean the other total rewrite that has had any networking beyond a single wired ethernet or the developer's Macbooks connecting via WiFi dodgy for five plus years? That turd, the software that never got to a working state before systemd just tossed it and replaced it?

        Plymouth

        Wow, some stupid eyecandy to keep newbs from seeing the bootup messages.

        Gnome

        Ok, I will give them GNOME3 since it is a turd that caused the first schism between RH and the users. But GNOME 1 and 2 had a lot of help, which is probably why they were more usable. SUN Microsystems, IBM, etc. all contributed parts of that code.

        ext3/4

        Redhat wrote that? Where did all those IBM and Lustre names come from on that paper Google found when I asked it who did it? Yea I know RH has done a lot of heavy lifting there, just pointing out there aren't the only ones in the game. Besides, some of us kinda like xfs.

        systemd is not Red Hat's attempt to take over Linux.

        No, systemd is the first part of a push to remake it into it into something alien to a UNIX user. Something more amendable to their support model.

        Red Hat doesn't mind.

        If that were true I'd wish them luck, there probably is a use case for their new OS in the cloud where they are focusing. But they are using every trick in the book to make adopting the whole New Tech stack the easy path and sticking to the UNIX Way increasingly difficult.

        you are slamming the only ally that the open source community has been able to consistently rely on for two decades.

        I have ran RedHat products since the earliest days. I know about their contributions. But they have made wrong moves before. They closed RHEL and they did it with little advance warning. I know, I was there and one of the ones who worked on the forks, I put up the first pages showing how to do a rebuild from scratch including ending the Anaconda game. For years the shipped packages had a very subtle bug in them that made it impossible to actually respin a bootable set of media, kept in as a sort of "your Kung Fu must be this strong to do this" thing to keep the number of unauthorized spins down. A fiendish bash quoting bug intended as a rite of passage, nobody who found it ever posted a fix because we all apparently instantly saw the purpose. But since we now HAD to respin keeping that secret was no longer worthwhile so I spilled those beans in a patched package so others could easily validate my work. I wanted anyone to be able to take RH's SRPMS, validate my fairly small patches and be able to build for themselves so they wouldn't have to trust me.

        But I haven't installed a new RH based physical or virtual machine in several years. And since adopting systemd, the Debian based systems I have been using have been frozen at 7 for servers and 6 (no GNOME3) for machines with a GUI. As soon as Devuan announces itself as production ready everything will begin to move there.

        This machine I'm typing on is still on Fedora but I now wait until the support ends before upgrading and fighting the issues, by then they are actually pretty managable. On my work Thinkpad though, new things break and others start working again with every update. Whether it docks, suspends, connects to the wired and/or WiFi, plays music out both external speakers, etc. are all hit or miss. Thank you RedHat, you have made Linux just as good as Windows! Next hardware cycle I will be picking a new OS of course, just not enough breaks that I can't fix to drive me to lose a day or two of getting useful things done.

        • (Score: 3, Touché) by dyingtolive on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:36AM

          by dyingtolive (952) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:36AM (#301225)

          At this point I prefer OSX to most linux distros, and that's not something I thought I would find myself saying 10 years ago. :(

          --
          Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
        • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:02AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:02AM (#301238)

          I have ran RedHat products...

          Have run. "Have ran" is illiterate and makes you look stupid.

          • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:23AM

            by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:23AM (#301249) Journal

            Claiming that a small error makes you look stupid makes you look stupid. Especially when you cannot know whether he is even a native speaker. How well are your foreign language skills? Not to mention that it might just be a typo anyway. Or a classic editing error (where you significantly change the sentence structure and forget to adapt some word).

            To be clear, there's IMHO nothing wrong in pointing out errors. It is, however, wrong to claim (or even just to think) that someone is stupid just because he doesn't always use the language exactly according to the rules. Especially if anyone with normal intelligence and minimal language knowledge can without doubt infer what exactly he meant.

            --
            The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
            • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:47AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:47AM (#301267)

              +Don't harsh on the grammar natz, dude! Chill!

              Maybe he meant "I have ran from Redhat products", a simple typo ellipsis. Otherwise it was an defective perfect, or an imperfect perfect.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:58PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:58PM (#301386)

            This is an increasingly common grammatical error that I've been hearing in the past few years, and from native English speakers in the US.

            The compound verb tense "have/had (main verb)" is being misconjugated. They use the simple past tense of the main verb after "have/had" instead of the proper tense.

            Examples:

            Incorrect: I had ate enough.
            Correct: I had eaten enough.

            Incorrect: I have ran 5 miles on a treadmill.
            Correct: I have run 5 miles on a treadmill.

            I agree, it's basic English, and it does make the person sound stupid-- except to all his friends who speak the same way!

        • (Score: 1) by mechanicjay on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:07AM

          by mechanicjay (7) <reversethis-{gro ... a} {yajcinahcem}> on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:07AM (#301314) Homepage Journal

          This machine I'm typing on is still on Fedora but I now wait until the support ends before upgrading and fighting the issues, by then they are actually pretty managable. On my work Thinkpad though, new things break and others start working again with every update. Whether it docks, suspends, connects to the wired and/or WiFi, plays music out both external speakers, etc. are all hit or miss. Thank you RedHat, you have made Linux just as good as Windows!

          Seriously, I've been running OpenSuse on my Thinkpads exclusively since 2008. I don't have these issues and everything just works "out of the box". Give the Green Lizard a try.

          --
          My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
          • (Score: 2) by Bill Dimm on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:53PM

            by Bill Dimm (940) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:53PM (#301435)

            I've been using OpenSUSE for several years, and I've been mostly happy with it, but they did start using systemd a while ago. I have 12.2 on one machine and 12.3 on another (both are systemd) and they both sometimes fail to shut down cleanly (12.2 more so than 12.3). I don't know if that's related to systemd, but it's something that I've never seen before (using Linux since 1995).

            • (Score: 2, Informative) by mechanicjay on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:29PM

              by mechanicjay (7) <reversethis-{gro ... a} {yajcinahcem}> on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:29PM (#301485) Homepage Journal

              Yes, the 12.x series was their transition to Systemd. 12.1 was completely borked, leaving you with a damn near unmanageable system, services that wouldn't start (or shutdown), disks that would change their UID at every reboot... 12.2 was a bit better, 12.3 a little better still. For the 13.x series they completed the transition and I've had no systemd related troubles since. 12.x was really a shit show.

              --
              My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:24PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:24PM (#301573)

            I've used Windows for longer than that and those problems kinda went out some time into Windows XP. And Windows 2000 was not that bad either (other than the slow boot time on old hardware of that time and some resource limits which supposedly could be worked-around: http://weblogs.asp.net/mikedopp/increasing-user-handle-and-gdi-handle-limits [asp.net] ). Windows 8.x and 10 on the other hand are abominations. And Vista never happened ;).

            I did use Linux for desktop purposes too at work for a few years starting from about 2005, and it was an inferior experience for much basic desktop stuff (clipboard management, sound handling, the general way the GUI should work) and only better in other more esoteric ways (e.g. kio slaves). I used KDE because it was less of a joke than GNOME (if you don't think so go look up what Linus said about GNOME around that time). Sad to say the desktop stuff today is still crap (I've reported bugs years ago that were closed with WONTFIX). The server stuff is still OK but I haven't moved to the SystemD crap yet.

            You bunch can keep saying desktop Linux is fine but, if things were really that great why have there been so many major forks along with lots of people saying others are screwing stuff up? Are they all wrong and stuff is great? It's almost as if Microsoft is paying Linux developers to screw stuff up every time Microsoft releases crap.

        • (Score: 2) by gnuman on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:47PM

          by gnuman (5013) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:47PM (#301491)

          PulseAudio

          TBH, Pulse Audio source code is poorly documented, difficult to understand. But what it does is work the way audio on linux is suppose to work under ALSA. The problem with ALSA is ALSA had NO USABLE DOCUMENTATION. For a project that important, WTF?? To write .asoundrc config files, you needed a PHD in brainfuck and half the time something was broken anyway because device detection order changed. At least with Pulse Audio there is pavucontrol allowing people to switch stuff around and for audio to work out of the box.

          I love command line, but audio on Linux definitely was a PITA before Pulse Audio came around.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2016, @07:48PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2016, @07:48PM (#306513)

            There was already JACK if you needed more than controlling the speaker volume on your motherboard DAC.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Alias on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:38AM

        by Alias (2825) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:38AM (#301229)

        GNU/Linux was around before Redhat. RedHat is not "giving everything away for free.". Redhat gets for free most of what it sells as a product. Granted, Redhat has done a lot of good work by contributing to GPL licensed software over the years, but that has all been simultaneously contributing to their own product. Everyone was fine with Redhat selling RHEL, consisting mostly of code that wasn't theirs because most of that code is GPLed, and Redhat wasn't violating the GPL with RHEL, and probably still isn't.

        But don't kid yourself into thinking that GNU/Linux wouldn't be relevant or successful without Redhat. Redhat is only really relevant itself because of Centos, and free software doesn't need corporate allies beyond competitive hardware vendors that document how their hardware works. (And the need for documentation is debatable.). The community took care of itself for a long time before any of the corporate Linux players contributed significantly, and it could do so again. Many of the things you listed that Redhat may have contributed to were around and robust before Redhat got involved. Redhat is *not* Linux. That notion is really quite insulting to the thousands of people that have contributed to GNU/Linux over the years who have had nothing directly to do with Redhat.

        Your post sounds like one of those "the internet wouldn't exist without Microsoft" shill posts over on the green site.

        • (Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday February 09 2016, @08:42AM

          by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 09 2016, @08:42AM (#301282) Journal

          Where I work we are migrating as much as possible off of Red Hat and on to CentOS. They want a license fee for every instance now, including for installations from the days before one was needed ie you could install for free but you paid if you wanted a support contract. Red Hat is trying to do a Microsoft: embrace and extend, creating lock-in. Run away fast while you still can.

          • (Score: 2, Informative) by mechanicjay on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:02AM

            by mechanicjay (7) <reversethis-{gro ... a} {yajcinahcem}> on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:02AM (#301311) Homepage Journal

            Yeah us too, we're running fast as we can, our RHEL Site Licence expires June 30, we're not renewing. A guy in my group wrote a script which converts a RHEL 7 box to a Centos7 Box. Just needs a singe reboot to load the new kernel and whatnot. It's flipping magic.

            --
            My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
            • (Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:24AM

              by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:24AM (#301317) Journal

              That's a very cool idea. How much work was it? Can he publish it somewhere?

            • (Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:52AM

              by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:52AM (#301329) Journal

              What's the betting they try to extinguish CentOS next? I foresee an army of lawyers descending.
               

              • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:56PM

                by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:56PM (#301437)

                I thought they were already "in charge of" CentOS?

                In January 2014, Red Hat announced that it would sponsor the CentOS project, "helping to establish a platform well-suited to the needs of open source developers that integrate technologies in and around the operating system".[16] As the result of these changes, ownership of CentOS trademarks was transferred to Red Hat,[17] which now employs most of the CentOS head developers; however, they work as part of the Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team, which operates separately from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team.[7] A new CentOS governing board was also established.[8]

                (wiki [wikipedia.org])

                Can't say I understood that when I heard it happened but it's quite possible I'm misunderstanding.

                --
                "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:45AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:45AM (#301266)

        Can one of you mod this shill clown down? We should have moderation "hella wrong".

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:43PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:43PM (#301378)

        If you caught Mother Teresea finger banging a 6 year old Indian boy, I dont care what she has done over the years, shes a fucking child rapist.

        Redhat is metaphorically fingerbaning Linux users in the asshole right now. And your only response is "slamming the only ally that the open source community has been able to consistently rely on for two decades."

        Obviously we cannot rely on them with this fucking systemd they are trying to fingerbang into you anus, so your point on being able to consistently rely on them has been proven false.

      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:48PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:48PM (#301431)

        the only ally that the open source community has been able to consistently rely on for two decades.

        Hey, I used to be a Red Hat fan, too. But, like Sun, all good things must end someday.

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:09AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:09AM (#301244) Journal

    Yeah, Red Hat has learned the Microsoft lesson well: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.